Abstract
Commonsense reasoning has proven exceedingly difficult both to model and to implement in artificial reasoning systems. This paper discusses some of the features of human reasoning that may account for this difficulty, surveys a number of reasoning systems and formalisms, and offers an outline of active logic, a non-classical paraconsistent logic that may be of some use in implementing commonsense reasoning.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that we do not make the converse claim—that formal logic tends to aim at modelling reasoning processes (i.e., psychologism).
- 2.
While details are complicated, most such approaches aim at the inference of special additional “normal” or “typical” formulas—such as Flies(x) from Bird(x)—when not ruled out by axioms.
- 3.
Let us call a logic that is used by a real-world reasoning agent (human or otherwise) as it goes about its business an “on-board” logic (as opposed to a specification—“spec”—logic that characterises limiting behaviours such as the set of all sentences that (eventually) can be proven). Thus we are using the term “logic” quite broadly, to include any systematic method for drawing conclusions from premises.
- 4.
So-called tense logics and temporal logics express propositions about past, present, and future, but the present is not represented as evolving: Now does not change as theorems are proved, in contrast with the above Clock Rule. In other words, tense logics are also spec logics, rather than on-board logics.
- 5.
For an overview of the various findings reported in this paragraph, see Evans (1982).
- 6.
Although this preference was reversed when the initial statement was a definition such as: if a mineral is a diamond then it is made of compressed carbon.
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Anderson, M.L., Gomaa, W., Grant, J., Perlis, D. (2013). An Approach to Human-Level Commonsense Reasoning. In: Tanaka, K., Berto, F., Mares, E., Paoli, F. (eds) Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4438-7_12
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